to use scare tactics and paranoia to extract confessions from those people who had been responsible for the “murder-suicide” of Derrick and Melinda Browne. They’d utilize the escape rooms already in development at their parents’ company, which specialized in disorientating situations, to do the trick, videotaping the confessions to clear their parents’ names.
He’d lied to her from the beginning. She knew that at the time. She knew more than he realized, but she’d gone along with it because her brother had something she desperately needed.
Money.
Persey’s crash pad at Las Vegas’s West Valley High School theater had been fine for the last few months, but scrounging for food as she tried to stretch her meager savings had proved more difficult (disgusting) than she’d anticipated. Besides, she’d be graduating in a couple of months, and then her access to the theater would be cut off. Her brother offered her something that was difficult to turn down and he knew it. But he’d promised that no one would get hurt.
Meanwhile he’d been planning this bloodbath all along.
“I said no one who was innocent would get hurt.”
Liar.
Lincoln had been a liar his entire life, showing one face to the world while nurturing a dark, perverted secret deep within himself. Persey was probably the only person who truly understood who he was, and yet she’d allowed herself to believe this would be different.
She may not have killed all those people with her own hands, but their deaths were on her head.
Lincoln watched her carefully. “Don’t be like that. You got to save your little friend back there.”
Persey’s eyes narrowed. “Promise me you’ll leave Neela alone. She had no idea what she was doing.”
“I still say she’s the guiltiest of all.” He met her gaze steadily, and once more, Persey recognized the bloodlust that had so terrified her that day in the guesthouse.
“Promise.”
“I promise to leave her alone.”
Persey didn’t believe for one second that her brother was telling the truth, and she realized with a pang that Neela’s life was, and would continue to be, her responsibility.
“Actually, it turned out to be a good thing you kept her alive,” Lincoln said. “Two eyewitnesses instead of one.”
Was he trying to placate her? Con her into letting her guard down with Neela? “Okay.”
“And you’re sure she doesn’t suspect anything?”
Persey was careful neither to jump in too quickly with her response nor pause too long before she gave it. She thought of Neela’s face as they sat in the lobby—the face of someone who realized the pieces didn’t all add up—and lied to her brother. “Yes.”
“Good. She’d be our only loose end, and I wouldn’t want to have to snip it.”
“You won’t.” I won’t let you.
Persey needed to change the subject. “You went too far posing us as Laurie Strode and Michael Meyers. What if one of them had been a horror fan? They might have realized we were represented as brother and sister and put the pieces together.”
Her brother laughed. “Oh, please. None of those people were going to figure that out. I was just having a little bit of fun.”
“Fun?”
“So. Much. Fun!” He clapped on each word. “I don’t even know what I loved the most: the staging, the trapdoor on that wood chipper, the maze of escape rooms? I mean, I know we had most of that stuff in development already, but it was a positively inspired idea on my part to string them all together.”
There was his ego again.
“Brilliant,” Genevieve said, stroking his cheek. “Amazing.”
Barf.
“Or the night-vision goggles. Man, those things are a trip. Gen, you have to try them sometime.”
“I’d love to!” Genevieve squealed. Which seemed to be her default mode of speaking. Turned out that Genevieve was the real actor of the bunch, playing a calm, suave businesswoman all day. She must have been very good at reading from a script.
“I’m surprised no one heard the clank when I dropped my pair in the pit,” Lincoln mused.
Persey gritted her teeth. “I seem to recall a lot of screaming at the time.”
He wasn’t even listening, lost in his own rhapsodic replay of the afternoon. “But I think my favorite was that wood chipper. Setting it in a white room? Wow. The way the blood hit the white…I…I just…”
“Are you crying?” Persey asked, horrified.
He wiped his eyes. “It was beautiful.”
Persey felt her stomach lurch. “It was Mackenzie’s internal organs.” This was her brother, her flesh and blood. Was there a piece of this bloodthirsty megalomaniac inside her as well? The thought was sickening.